A Trip Down South

A friend is visiting from the US.  She’s doing her MBA at Duke and participating in an exchange program at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad.  She’s fully immersing herself into the travel too!  Every weekend for the past four, she’s been out and about.  Her term ends fairly soon and then she has a break before heading back to the US.  This is when she emailed me wanting to know if I’d be interested in doing a trip to Kerala, Kochi (aka Cochin), and Lakshadweep.

Having done travels in the North and even some of the West, I have been waiting for an opportunity to head down South.  I had heard about Kerala and the lakes, waters and general tropical environment.  This was perfect!  Well, not quite!  Things have picked up at work!  We are heading into a very busy next few months.  But, if there was any time in the next 3-4 months where I could feasibly get out of town for so long, the 10 days coming up is the small cracked window!  And so I am going to go!  I might be able to pull a weekend trip here and there (if that), but 10 days is not going to be possible later.

We know we are going to the Periyar Tiger Reserve.  We are also doing the houseboat on the Kerala backwaters.  We had planned for Lakshadweep but with hotel bookings costing Rs. 11,000 per night, we decided to skip that.  I haven’t had much time to review where we will go and neither has my friend, so we’re going to be winging it.  I’m hoping we’ll make it to Ooty, it’s about 275 km from Kochi.  I’m pretty much going with the flow on this trip.  I do have places I’d like to go but given that I haven’t seen anything in the South, there’s plenty to see.

I bought the Lonely Planet South India guidebook.  This is one of the better books for travel and I’ve used it before.  Now, I just need to go through it and identify a few places for us to check out!  Should be a fun trip!